Facebook vs. Instagram – Which platform is best for your brand?

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Although Facebook, Inc. owns Instagram, there are quite a few differences between the two popular social platforms when it comes to marketing strategies. While you can certainly test marketing campaigns on either platforms (or both, simultaneously), there are some important distinctions to keep in mind before deciding whether Facebook or Instagram should be your brand’s #1 priority:

Instagram can help you reach younger audiences. Gen Z isn’t very interested in Facebook. While their parents, grandparents and even Millennial counterparts are still steadily using the platform, Gen Z is much more focused on Instagram and Snapchat. This means that marketers targeting audiences younger than 30-35 should factor overall reach into their campaign strategy and proceed with Instagram if you want to find Gen Z.

Sharing links is more difficult on Instagram. Unless you have a promoted/sponsored post with an Instagram business account, sharing links can be pretty difficult for marketers on Instagram. You only get one link in your profile and none for the caption of your post, which means that sharing stats will likely be much lower on Instagram than they would be on sharing-friendly Facebook. If you want to promote multiple web links at the same time, share links to content on your website or blog, or prioritize click-through rates in your next marketing campaign, then Facebook would be more suitable for these marketing objectives.

Adding Instagram can help increase engagement. There are more than 800 million monthly Instagram users (500 million of these are daily active users), and a majority of these users are based outside of the U.S. Notably, a 2016 study found that the engagement rate for all audiences on Instagram hovered around 0.84%, while Facebook’s engagement rate was only 0.53%. Additionally, studies have shown that Instagram users spend more time interacting with brands compared with Facebook users. Although Instagram makes it difficult to organically drive web traffic, a Yotpo study found that, on average, Instagram users spent more time on the website (192 seconds) compared with Facebook users who clicked on a link to a website (105 seconds).

All in all, there are plenty of good qualities to Facebook and Instagram that marketers can’t afford to ignore. However, with the latest privacy scandals and #DeleteFacebook movement (which was particularly popular among teens and early 20-somethings), Instagram is increasingly viewed as a better platform for marketers to use to reach their target audience members and boost sales.

4 things every marketer must avoid when writing captions for social posts

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Writing creative, engaging captions is one of the most difficult aspects of social media marketing. Considering our unprecedented access to millions of high-quality stock images, finding the perfect visual elements for a social post is practically effortless in comparison to writing clever captions, which still requires a bit of critical thinking, skillful writing and audience awareness.

Even if writing isn’t necessarily your strength as a marketer, you can still write acceptable captions for your social media posts, as long as you avoid these engagement-ending, conversion-killing mistakes:

Spelling and Grammatical Errors

This may sound like common sense advice, but you might be surprised by how many brands slip up on the proofreading process before publishing on social media. Mistakes happen every now and again, but if you’re consistently misspelling the same words, using incorrect grammar (e.g., there vs. their vs. they’re), or using improper capitalization for certain titles, then you might be inadvertently driving followers and potential customers away with your imprecise spelling and grammar.

All Sales, No Substance

One of the most common problems with social media captions is that the brand is too focused on their message of Buy! Buy! Buy! and forgetting to consistently engage their followers. If a vast majority of your posts involve some message about buying your products/services, then it’s time for a caption makeover.

You can engage followers by asking them questions (which, in turn, gives you valuable demographic/psychographic information), running polls (a fan favorite for Instagram stories in particular), and asking them to post photos of themselves (user-generated content opportunity!). This isn’t to say you should avoid explicit sales-driven captions at all costs; instead, make sure your salesy messages are posted alongside other, more substantive captions that treat audiences like human beings instead of potential customers.

Minimal Variety in Messages

Perhaps you don’t have an issue with too many sales messages on your social profiles, yet your brand still isn’t getting the engagement you’d like to have with your target audience. What’s going on?

Read through your last 10-20 social posts and take notes on your captions. Are you mostly just asking people to like and share if they agree with the caption? Are you mostly posting statements, without ever posing questions for audience members to answer in the comment section? Are you mostly relying on evergreen captions (which are always loosely relevant) or are you incorporating recent trends and seasonal messages into your captions?

Make sure your brand is always offering insightful advice, intriguing questions, and compelling calls-to-action in your captions to prevent audience members from growing bored with your content.

Too Many Hashtags or Emojis

On the one hand, you don’t want to have a boring caption with only a general, forgettable hashtag and no emojis. On the other hand, you don’t want to drown your captions in hashtags and emojis in an attempt to appeal to audience members’ interest in diversified, clever captions.

To achieve balance and maximize engagement, strive to include one or two hashtags per Twitter post and two to five hashtags per Instagram post, along with an emoji or two. It’s important to consistently experiment with new styles (e.g., one hashtag and four emojis for a post then three hashtags and no emojis for another post) to see what types of caption content work best for your target audience.

4 quick ways to optimize your LinkedIn Company Page

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According to HootSuite research, there are more than 30 million company pages on LinkedIn. This is undoubtedly an impressive figure, except for the fact that many companies fail to fully optimize their pages in ways that will generate more traffic and buzz for their businesses.

If you want to get the most out of your company page, here are four quick and easy ways you can improve your brand’s professional online presence:

Complete the “About” Section

One of the easiest ways to direct more traffic to your company’s website is by including it on your company page. It sounds like common sense advice, but you’d be surprised by how many businesses fail to list their websites, phone numbers, addresses, hours and other relevant information on their social media pages, especially a professional networking site like LinkedIn!

Don’t leave this opportunity to connect with new audience members on the table – fill out your “About” section before you promote the page or add any new content to it. This also goes for your company’s summary: you get up to 2,000 characters to explain who you are and what you do, so don’t waste this section by only filling in a few sentences’ worth of information about your company.

Include Relevant Hashtags

Did you know that LinkedIn company pages let you include hashtags for your business? Unlike Instagram, there’s typically no limit to the number of hashtags you can include, but for best results, you’ll want to aim for around 5-10 hashtags related to your products/services and industry. This can make your page more discoverable for people searching for companies just like yours with the same keywords.

Customize Your Page for Global Audiences

Did you know you can create a LinkedIn profile and company page in multiple languages? LinkedIn also lets users translate posts in their newsfeeds into more than 60 languages, but you can get a step ahead of your competition by proactively offering translated versions of your page and posts for non-English speaking audience members.

Repost Content from Your Blog

Far too many companies on LinkedIn are making the critical mistake of not reposting their valuable blog content on LinkedIn. Instead, many companies either leave their pages relatively empty or they try to encourage people to visit the official company blog instead.

But why can’t you encourage people to engage with your brand directly on LinkedIn? To stay relevant, your brand should develop a regular content marketing strategy specifically geared toward a LinkedIn audience. This may involve a blend of short posts, full-length blogs and/or videos — as long as it’s quality content and your company page is optimized to drive traffic to your website, then it’s hard to go wrong with this strategy!

How to healthcare professionals can keep their social marketing efforts HIPAA compliant

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Social media is everywhere – its ubiquitous use now touches nearly every facet of human life. In the healthcare industry specifically, users of social media must always be aware of the fine line between proper and improper information sharing.

Being governed by strictHIPAA compliance standards, the healthcare industry must manage the rising use of social media in healthcare settings. Maintaining HIPAA compliance must always be the first priority when sharing sensitive healthcare information.

According to a recent DC Interactive Group report, 26 percent of all hospitals in the U.S. participate in social media. Another study revealed that a whopping 92 percent of marketers indicate efforts in social media have created better exposure for their business.

Healthcare marketers have huge opportunities when it comes to social media marketing, but how do organizations know what is acceptable for them or their employees to share and what is not?

Social Media and HIPAA Compliance

There are a number of benefits to sharing information and patient success stories. Although HIPAA does provide a strict framework to operate within, there are still ways to stay social, secure and in compliance.

Although institutions and employees may use personal social media channels, discussing patient information on those channels is strictly forbidden. The following guidelines apply to healthcare businesses as well as workers:

  1. Avoid gossiping about patients.
  2. Identify a central point of contact.
  3. If you wouldn’t say it to a co-worker, don’t post it online.
  4. Be aware of the tone you are using when you post something.
  5. Do not bring professional matters into your personal life.

By using social media, healthcare marketers can both increase awareness and share positive stories. They can provide crucial information and assist with decision-making. By keeping these tips in mind, you can stay in compliance while still reaching your target audience.

 

Does your business still need a blog? You bet.

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Come on, do businesses really need a blog?

It’s a lot of work, right? And there are so many other things you could be doing to bring revenue into the business. Do blogs matter? Are they worth the time that it takes to write 400 words for some unknown reader?

In this increasingly digital world, where content marketing is playing a greater role than ever before, the answer is an absolute yes. Consider for a moment the impact any given blog may have on you, even in subtle ways. The truth is, once you publish content, it can have a lasting impact on the reader and help foster positive feelings toward your brand. Especially when they’re centered around evergreen content, blogs work with both the short- and long-tail approach to content marketing.

 

Needless to say, blog content can have a significant impact on people’s perception of your company, and be well worth the investment of time. Here are our top three reasons why you should put your creative juices to work to create a blog for your business.

  1. Blogs establish you as a thought leader. When you share your expertise in a blog post, you are positioning yourself as an authority on a topic. Blogs build brand awareness and highlight your industry knowledge. Customers like working with people who know their stuff.
  2. Blogs increase your online searchability. When you publish a post, you get a quick boost in traffic. Over time, you reap the reward of ongoing search engine traffic because every time someone searches for a particular bit of information, your post comes up. Even better, blog posts can be repurposed into other forms of content such as ebooks and presentations.
  3. Blogs create conversation. With comments and social sharing buttons, look for opportunities to interact directly with customers, prospects and other industry professionals. You may do this directly on your website. We love to take that conversation to LinkedIn, where longer-length content is part of the professional culture. Make your comments professional but informal. And let complainers know you’ll follow up with them offline to keep things upbeat and positive.

Ready for a business blog? Or are you considering it? We’d love to hear your thoughts on business blogging. Tell us what you’re doing (or not!) and why.

It’s time for a social media audit. Here’s how to do it.

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When was the last time you reviewed your social media strategy?

Do you even have a strategy? Or have you been posting just to post, inconsistently, without any sort of plan?

All good marketing starts with a plan. If you don’t have one, you need one.

If you do have one, you need to understand what you’ve been doing and how well it’s been working.

When it comes to social selling, that means doing a social media audit. Hearing the word “audit” might send shivers up your spine, but don’t worry. This kind of audit is well worth the time and effort. The good news is that it doesn’t have to be daunting.

There are common elements to all social audits, regardless of the platform. These six steps cover the core social strategy components you need to be on top of.

  1. Your Profile: Are your images clear and professional? Is your bio compelling?
  2. Your Posts: Are you posting regularly? Is the content interesting? Is the frequency right for the platform?
  3. Your Formatting: Do you have your posts customized for each channel? Are you using the appropriate tools for that platform?
  4. Your Tools: Do you have a way to track and analyze your progress, such as Google Analytics?
  5. Your Competition: Are you reviewing what your competitors are doing and figuring out what’s working for them?
  6. Your List: Are you capturing leads to build your email list?

See? It’s not so hard. With these easy steps, you’ll have a better sense of how your social media strategy is moving you toward – or away from – your company’s goals. One final thought to add — potential customers are online every second of every day looking for businesses to meet their needs. Are you visible? If you’re not, it’s time to do something about that, whether you take the DIY route or work with a team of professionals. Whatever you choose, make sure you audit your social media strategy. Just putting thought into it will yield positive results.

3 strategies for conquering writer’s block and rejuvenating your approach to content marketing

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After many months/years of blogging about the same general industry, products and/or services, you may find yourself running out of new ideas for your blog. This happens to countless bloggers — individuals and companies alike — so you’re definitely not alone if you’ve been feeling burned out and not too creative lately.

However, consistent posting is absolutely essential for a successful content marketing strategy, so how can you come up with new ideas and keep producing outstanding content if you’ve written about everything under the sun? Here are some ideas for overcoming writer’s block and rejuvenating your blog content to continue your content marketing campaign’s success:

Repurpose Old Content

If you have any audio content (old interviews, podcasts, etc.) that hasn’t been published in text format yet, now’s the best time to get started! The same logic applies for videos (even if they have captions, some people just don’t like watching videos) or blog posts you haven’t converted into audio/video formats yet. You might even consider creating infographics with statistics and research from an old (but not out of date) blog post, or updating blog posts from two or three years ago with new research, new links and new commentary.

Bring in Guest Bloggers

If you’re burned out, maybe it’s best to take a brief break from blogging and let someone else take the reins for a while. Bringing in multiple guest bloggers offers many benefits: new and interesting perspectives your audience might not have been exposed to before, free high-quality content (usually in exchange for a link back to their website or blog), and time for you to rest and refocus without sacrificing your blog’s posting schedule. (You could drive away audience members if you’re not consistent).

Snoop on Your Competitors

Disclaimer: We’re not arguing in favor of plagiarism (which not only looks bad for search algorithms but also for audience members reading your blog). Instead of blatantly copying your competitors (which again, you should never do), you can find out what topics are popular on their blogs by browsing their comment sections and assessing their engagement rates on social media (especially “share” rates).

Even if you’re always on top of industry news, there may be opportunities for evergreen content that you’re overlooking. To keep your blog content fresh, interesting and informative, perform your own outside research and try to include more useful advice or insightful commentary that was missing from your competitors’ blog posts.

4 clever ways to encourage more follower engagement on social media

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It’s no longer enough to simply have a ton of followers on your brand’s social media channels; you need authentic and consistent engagement to get the most value out of your social media marketing campaigns.

After all, engagement rates are one of the best ways to measure the results of your marketing efforts because it’s easy to follow a brand but takes more time and effort to like/comment/share posts from a brand. If you’ve been struggling to boost engagement rates on your social media pages, here are some of the most successful strategies:

Ask Them Questions

What are your biggest obstacle when it comes to social media marketing? What is the No. 1 goal your brand is trying to achieve with its marketing strategy this year? What’s the biggest marketing mistake you’ve made and what did you learn from it?

Asking questions like the ones above (tailored to your unique audience, of course) is an incredibly useful strategy for encouraging more followers to engage with your brand on social media. It’s thought-provoking, it makes them pause and think about something related to both themselves and your brand/products/services, and it invites them to share their thoughts in the comment section on your post. This is also a valuable opportunity to get qualitative feedback from your followers, so don’t resign your posts to statement-only captions!

Tag a Friend in the Comments

This strategy is helpful for growing your follower and engagement rates. The “tag a friend in the comments” call-to-action is typically deployed with a fun/entertaining post, as opposed to more sales-y posts, which may get less traction on the engagement front because it looks like a brand is trying too hard to boost its own sales.

To avoid appearing desperate or overly sales-driven, mix up some of your product/service posts with light-hearted general content that relates to your industry. Great examples of this strategy include Lulus and BarkBox.

Story Polls

How often do you post new content to your Instagram, Facebook and/or SnapChat stories? If you’re not using the stories features or you’re using them sporadically, then you could be missing out on a great chance to get valuable insight from your target demographic. One of the most effective engagement-boosting strategies involves creating a poll with a question and two options for audience members to choose from.

For example, a financial company might post a poll asking if student loan debt or saving for retirement is a greater concern for individuals. The results of this hypothetical poll would be useful for determining the relative age and financial concerns/preferences of the company’s followers. You can do the same thing by incorporating polls semi-regularly into your stories (pro tip: avoid poll fatigue by posting a poll 1-2 times per week maximum).

Host a Photo Contest

Lastly, many brands get great engagement rates when they carefully plan and roll out a photo contest. This is an excellent opportunity to accumulate user-generated content, in addition to building hype for your brand among existing and potential audience members who want to win the grand prize. Many brands partner with influencers and/or other brands to rein in the costs of contest prizes, so the sky’s the limit when it comes to creative uses of photo contests for social media.

4 smart strategies for creating the perfect content marketing schedule

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When individuals and brands first begin blogging, they often start out with a grand plan for scheduling well-researched content with clearly established goals and deadlines for each piece. Then — of course — life gets in the way and the idea of maintaining and updating an editorial calendar seems like a huge chore, one that eventually falls by the wayside in favor of a more spontaneous approach to content creation and curation.

Even if you still follow an editorial calendar to some extent, there are likely areas in your content strategy that could use improvement when it comes to your scheduling practices. Here are some strategies the most successful content marketers use to optimize their editorial calendars:

Create Daily or Weekly Themes

Do you write and publish whatever feels relevant to your brand in a given moment, or are there clear themes you’re covering each day or week? For example, you could conduct weekly interviews with industry experts that are published once per week on the same day (preferably in written and audio formats, if possible).

Alternatively, you could announce a theme at the beginning of each week and incorporate that theme into your blog posts, social media posts, and other content published throughout the week. Even with content themes, however, you’ll still want to mix up specialized content with evergreen content to ensure at least some of your blog retains a bit of longevity 3, 6 or 12+ months from now.

Stick to a Content Marketing Editorial Calendar

Do you currently have a content marketing editorial calendar? If so, is it in an Excel spreadsheet, Google form, content scheduling platform, or elsewhere? To maximize the likelihood of following your editorial calendar — and maintain your team’s motivation to stick to the calendar — you should consolidate all of your editorial notes, deadlines and other information in one easy to access location (bonus points if you can schedule upcoming blog and social posts from the same platform).

Write Content 2+ Weeks in Advance

Some people work better under the pressure of an impending deadline, but this is not an ideal strategy to rely on for the long-haul. Instead, your content writing team should be producing content at least two weeks in advance, which gives your design and editorial teams plenty of time to optimize the content for audience engagement and catch any mistakes before publication.

Even if new information comes out within that 2+ week timeframe that necessitates changes to the content, you’ll still be in a much better position if all you have to do is add or erase a sentence here and there, as opposed to writing, editing, and designing an entire blog post within a couple days.

Get Everyone Onboard

A final must-have in any successful content marketing strategy is team cohesion. In other words, you want everyone to be on the same page about each step of the content production and publication process. Even if you’re working with a remote content team, you should still schedule weekly or monthly team meetings to give everyone the chance to vocalize any issues or concerns they’re experiencing, which other team members could potentially help resolve.

This also requires consistent attention to your brand’s content guidelines, so that you’re always maintaining the same “voice” for your brand across channels (even if you have multiple content writers) and you can readily adapt to changes (e.g., SEO practices) whenever necessary with minimal disruption to your team.

4 innovative ways to reach Gen Z on social media

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Whether you’re in your 20s or 50s, crafting social media posts and other marketing messages for a Generation Z audience can be pretty complicated. As the first generation born and raised during the height of the Internet’s popularity (whereas many Millennials didn’t start regularly using the Internet until middle or high school), Gen Z is truly a puzzle for many marketers.

If you want to boost authentic engagement with younger audiences on your brand’s social pages, then you can’t afford to ignore these four innovative ways for connecting with the tweens, teens and young adults of Gen Z:

Learn the Lingo

Are you living your best life? Yeet! Are your social captions on fleek? Does your product model look like a snack?

To help you stay woke (aware, informed), learning the latest meme-ified phrases concocted by Gen Z’s Internet sensations is an absolute must for any brand that wants to stay relevant. Of course, you’ll want to actually talk to Gen Z’ers to know what these words/phrases mean to ensure you use them correctly in any branded communications with your audience. Why? Because nothing is more sus (shady or questionable) to teens and young adults than brands trying too hard to market to them without actually understanding what the lingo means.

Teen-Fluencers

If learning the Gen Z lingo is too complicated or just does not make sense, no matter how many times you consult Urban Dictionary, then you could always hire a teenage influencer to speak to your audience in a language they’ll understand. Teen-fluencers, as they’re informally called, are teenagers between the ages of 12-17 who get paid $5 to $20 per post (on average) by brands that want to reach younger demographics without the usual advertising approach (paid ads or contracts with influencers).

Teen-fluencers aren’t old enough to get “real” jobs yet, so they’re eager to find opportunities to partner with brands and hawk their products to their 1,000 to 6,000+ followers in exchange for per-post payments via PayPal or Venmo.

Voting on Insta Stories

Even if you’re regularly posting new content to your brand’s Instagram account, this might not be enough to engage your Gen Z audience. This younger generation represents one of the biggest demographics of short story users on social media (Instagram and SnapChat mostly – Facebook isn’t too popular among Gen Z). This means that you must be posting content to your Insta Story on a near-daily basis to keep followers engaged beyond their overcrowded Instagram feeds.

But you can’t just post random photos or marketing messages to your Story — one popular way to get Gen Z’ers actively clicking on your content is through voting. All you need to do is post a photo with a question (you get 2 options for answers) and let your followers vote away! It’s a great way to not only get your followers to interact with your brand but also a way to gain valuable insight into their consumer habits, likes/dislikes, and more.

Meme Creation Contests

Many brands try — and fail — to cater to Millennials and Gen Z’ers by incorporating viral Internet memes into their social media marketing campaigns. Rather than running the risk of using a meme incorrectly, you can host a user-generated content contest emphasizing memes instead. This allows your audience members to signal what memes are popular among their age demographics and encourage them to interact with your brand on social media by incentivizing them with a contest. It’s a win-win for everyone!